|
Jay Currie has a very close reading of Judge Hadjis' decision in the Marc Lemire case. I encourage you to read it all, but here's the part that struck me:
In the ordinary course of things, before Richard Warman arrived at the CHRC, the Commission would investigate complaints under s. 13 as they were made by ordinary citizens. It waited for a complaint and then it acted. As it happened, there were not a lot of complaints under this particular section...
Now, Richard Warman, brought a different agenda to the Commission. “Maximum Disruption”. The CHRC’s hate crimes unit was no longer in the business of passively waiting for citizens to complain about hate speech. Now the idea was to root out hate speech and rigorously prosecute it. The Commission sought Memorandums of Understanding with various police forces. It investigated websites even before complaints were filed...
When Warman left the Commission he made a practice of filing complaints against the sorts of basement Nazis and white supremacists who made the best targets for his award winning tactic of “maximum disruption”.
Gradually the Commission was transformed from a remedial body to a prosecutorial entity which danced to the tune of its chief complainant...
Now, as Hadjis elegantly lays out, the ruling in Taylor never contemplated the CHRC as prosecutorial. Chief Justice Dickson never imagined that one man would turn the Tribunal into a Star Chamber in which the ideals of remediation, conciliation and good faith gave way to the most vicious sorts of adversarial behavior.
This is why, even if one accepts the Supreme Court's Taylor decision, Section 13 is no longer "constitutional". Because Warmanization has entirely perverted the very narrow approval the Dickson court gave to it. In a sense, the CHRC has destroyed itself, by permitting a one-man annexation of Section 13 and its transformation into Warman's Law.
Next time Commissar Lynch jets off to Dublin at taxpayer expense to whine that she don't get no respect or Pearl Eliadis writes one of her plonking defenses of state censorship, ask them about Warman. This is why real justice systems have protections and procedures - so that they can't be hijacked by one narcissistic dress-up Nazi's creepy self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment program.
Meanwhile, when all the huzzahs and hosannas and Toronto Star "Section 13 is unsalvageable" editorials have died down, Freedom Through Truth says it ain't over and J Ly and the gang will already be plotting their next move.
On Monday, by the way, Ezra Levant and I will be on Wendy Sullivan's Brass Balls Radio show to discuss the Lemire decision.
|
